Mark Cavendish: a day in the life with Britain's Tour de France sprint sensation

In the first article from Sports Life, the Sunday Telegraph's new quarterly
supplement, published in association with London 2012 partner BT, Daniel
Friebe lives a day in the life of Mark Cavendish, who recently made British
Tour de France history.

Centre stage: Mark Cavendish's Tour de France has made headline news all over the worldPhoto: AP

The date is March 1 2009, a Sunday, the place a nondescript bar within a Tour de France sprint of Manchester’s Piccadilly Station. Mark Cavendish, who can swagger into a place like this and elicit not a flicker of recognition, has his head in his hands.

“I can’t do it,” he says. “I just can’t win four stages of the Tour de France again. It’s impossible. Four stages. Four!”

Cavendish wears his usual ragamuffin’s smile but his anxiety is real. A week ago, he was underlining his status as the world’s fastest road cyclist by winning two stages of the Tour of California. A fortnight before that it had been the same story at the Tour of Qatar. His dominance is ruining careers.

And yet Cavendish, the braggart, the boy racer, the big time Charlie, is still in awe of what he achieved on four golden afternoons in the world’s greatest cycle race last July.

It can’t be done. How many times has Cavendish heard that? So, after winning his fourth stage of the 2009 Tour in St Fargeau, he fixes a journalist with what has become the most feared glare in Tour de France press rooms. His eyebrows lunge, his pupils contract. The poor fellow asking the question isn’t even the one who dared suggest that today’s uphill finish was too steep for the Manx Express; he merely related comments by “Cav’s” Columbia-HTC team owner Bob Stapleton, who had the audacity to claim his protégé wasn’t today’s favourite. For a split second, there is fury in Cavendish’s eyes. Then the grin returns.

“Thanks Bob,” he says finally, sarcastically.

Stapleton and his Columbia HTC team are more used to Cavendish’s genuine outpourings of gratitude. Today, as always, the first thing he did after crossing the line was turn around, throw open his arms and hug his team-mates as they sped past, like a goalkeeper catching human footballs.

Twenty-four hours ago the same routine took place after he’d removed his shades and cleaned their lenses as he crossed the line. His sunglasses sponsor loved that. One French team manager wasn’t alone in calling the gesture “arrogant”.

Where there is Cavendish, there is drama. “It’s always been like this, so I don’t know any different,” he shrugs. In the press conference in Saint Fargeau, he finds himself parrying allegations of racism from an anonymous rider who supposedly heard him railing against the “------- Frenchies” and their “---- country” in an airport queue. “I love France and I love this race,” he protests.

Cavendish’s morning begins at different times depending on where the day’s stage starts, and at what time. Today (the day of his fourth stage win), he woke to a 9.15 alarm in a soulless, two-star Hotel Campanile on the outskirts of Châteauroux, the scene of his first-ever Tour stage win 12 months ago. “The Tour organisers operate a system whereby, over the three weeks, you get some good hotels, some pretty average ones,” he explains, without needing to specify in which category today’s Campanile belonged. At 24, Cavendish may already be a millionaire, but he still has to share a room. His flatmate for three weeks is his most important lieutenant, the Aussie Mark Renshaw. Every morning, they stagger downstairs to a breakfast that is less a meal than an exercise in ritual feeding. “Three bowls of Choco-mix or Special K, soya milk, then a croissant or bread roll, two espressos and I’m ready to roll,” Cavendish says.

The 26-year-old Renshaw is a dead ringer for Prince Harry. Fortunately for Cavendish, he’s rather more skilled in matters of international diplomacy. Renshaw discusses and defuses “Frenchie-gate” with home rider Geoffroy Lequatre. By the end of the chat, they’re laughing nearly as much as Cavendish will be tomorrow when he rides past the Garmin team bus en route to the start line and hears Bradley Wiggins hail “the founding member of the Isle of Man branch of the Ku Klux Klan”.

Stapleton, a millionaire former telecommunications magnate, says he’s never seen anyone like Cavendish. “Everyone’s always telling me how to manage him but there’s very little I’d like to change. He’s so self-aware and that’s really rare. I’m 50 years old and I’ve built some pretty successful companies, but the way he deals with stressful situations amazes me.”

Rod Ellingworth, his long-time coach, tells it like it is: “When Cav respects you, he’s great, but if he doesn’t, he can be a right little toerag.”

He believes that one of Cavendish’s key advantages lies in the way he “glides” through the moving mêlée, “barely touching the pedals”. “Like a bumblebee buzzing from flower to flower, in search of the nectar that sprinters call shelter,” Cavendish writes in his autobiography Boy Racer.

En route to Saint Fargeau, Cavendish and his team hoover up the two survivors of the early breakaway group with five kilometres to go. The task from here on in is simple: keep the pace so high that it is nigh on impossible for single riders or groups to escape and prevent a sprint finish. Or even better, keep it so high that, when it’s finally time to launch Cavendish, the others are no further advanced than the Manxman’s rear wheel.

The speed now edges 60 kilometres an hour.

“George [Hincapie] is one of the best guys on the road for positioning,” Renshaw explains. “He knows where we have to be; then Tony Martin has got amazing horsepower. He needs to lead from one kilometre to 600 metres, or 550 metres, to go.

“Then I take over, but we’re going that fast by then that no one’s moving. I’ve got a good 400 metres in my legs, and then I leave Cav with about 180 metres [to go].”

When Renshaw talks about the magic number of 180 metres, it’s really just another way of saying that Cavendish can hold top speed for about 10 seconds. Today, on such a steep uphill rise to the line in the last 500 metres, that meant dropping him off at closer to 100 metres out.

It was close – closer than any of Cavendish’s other three stage wins in this Tour to date, too close for more sponsor-friendly showboating — but it was also enough. Enough to beat Wiggins’s team-mate Tyler Farrar. Enough to reclaim temporarily the green jersey as leader of the Tour’s points competition from the Norwegian Thor Hushovd.

The only thing Cavendish misjudged was all those months ago in Manchester when he said it couldn’t be done. He was wrong.

After the podium presentation, after the press conference, after the doping control, he dives into one of his Columbia team vehicles and is driven to the three-star Hostellerie des Clos in Chablis, 60 kilometres away. “I usually spend a lot of the journey back to the hotel on the phone, either taking calls or reading texts. As soon as I win, my phone goes into meltdown. There’s always a text from Rod [Ellingworth], one from Dools, my best mate on the Isle of Man, loads from other riders, some of whom I’ve beaten that day,” he says.

When they pull into the hotel car park, it’s gone eight and there’s barely time for his usual hour-long session with Aldis, his masseur. At races, Columbia ban alcohol except when they win. Tonight they all toast Cavendish with a red chosen by one of the team’s Italian coaches.

Cavendish is tired. For all that Ellingworth marvels at the economy of his riding, today’s four hours, 17 minutes in the saddle have cost Cavendish about 4,000 calories (as compared with 7,000 on some mountain stages). “It’s nuts, absolutely nuts what we do. I’m not going to big it up but I’m not going to bull---- either. It’s crazy. The risks, the pressure, the stress… it’s absolutely nuts,” he tells anyone who has never raced 3,500 kilometres over three weeks.

As he does every night, before dropping off to sleep at around midnight, Cavendish lies in bed studying the 225-page route guide given to him at the start of the race in Monaco a fortnight ago. He spends five minutes poring over the details of tomorrow’s Stage 12 from Tonnerre to Vittel, particularly the map of the last three kilometres.

But, for once, his homework is in vain. Nicki Sorensen wins the day. Eight days later and Cavendish has survived the Alps but sees no other opportunities to draw clear of Barry Hoban as the most prolific British stage winner before the Tour ends on the Champs Elysées. His only goals, he says, are that and a night out in Paris to celebrate his first completed Tour.

But the longer the Tour goes on, the more predictions Cavendish gets wrong: three days from the end, on a stage so hilly that even he had all but written himself off, Cav makes it five.

Two days later and Cav's Columbia express-train delivers him safely to the final stretch of the Champs Elysées where he wins an incredible sixth stage, while becoming the first Briton to win the prestigious final stage.

Pride of Britain Cycling was Britain’s most succesful sport at the Beijing Games, but from 1960 to 1988 (eight Olympics) British cyclists did not win a single medal.

Prize money Winnings for the Tour are meagre by modern standards. The winner is given a cheque for £358,000, which is divided among team-mates and support staff.

French drought France boasts the riders with most Tour wins (36) but the last Frenchman to win was Bernard Hinault in 1985. Richard Virenque was the last one on the podium in 1997.

This article originally appeared in Sports Life, the Sunday Telegraph's new quarterly supplement, published in association with London 2012 partner BT.